[YmMot]

It's perhaps worth noting that it's not calling a spade a spade though. A moron is literally a person who is mentally retarded, though it's use in science is now limited since it's considered offensive.

It's one thing to say "Your idea is a bad one", "What you say doesn't make sense", "Your reasoning is flawed"....etc. It's lazy and offensive to just dismiss someone by suggesting they are disabled in some way.

I also don't understand why people feel the need to take these conversations into the realm of absolutes.

If someone stands up and suggests "Hey maybe we shouldn't call eachother morons and try to be nicer in our conversations"...all of a sudden they're a pitchfork-wielding PC crusader?

This is just a reminder. A suggestion.

(almost) Nobody is saying:

"Linus is a horrible person because he made an off the cuff remark that perhaps was slightly misguided"

"Let's destroy anyone who uses the word 'moron'"

"Hey we're all such better people than Linus right?"

"If someone called me a moron, I wouldn't know what to do...I'd just cry and break down like a baby...it'd be the end of the world"

Humans are fickle and changing creatures. Every now and then we need to take personal inventory as individuals and as a culture. Every now and then we need to say "Hey, maybe we should be nicer to each other"; especially when we are starting to develop a culture of being offensive, rude, and unproductive.

There's no excuse for calling someone a moron as far as I'm concerned. It will always be a lazy and wrong thing; it's just a question of to what extent. Being lazy and wrong is a part of being human, so yes...there are many situations where I saw one person calling another a moron I would be understanding and wouldn't make a big deal out of it. That doesn't mean it's not something that shouldn't have happened...

We as programmers should have an intuitive understanding that when something goes wrong you don't start pointing fingers, assigning blame, and insulting eachother.... No, we talk about what happened; why it happened and how we can try to make it not happen again.

Here we have one person calling another a moron. This is something that, ideally, should never happen ever. It's also something that is occurring in our community often enough that we as a community could use some talking about it to start trying to work our way back towards the ideal, regardless of whether we will ever reach it or not.